Kaspersky launches its own OS on Russian routers

Kaspersky Lab has finished building its eponymous operating system after four years of quiet development.

Little information about the OS has made it onto the English-speaking side of the internet. Kaspersky Labs Russia told Vulture South to wait a few weeks for the English press release for information.

What we do know is that in 2012 ebullient Kaspersky Lab chief executive officer Eugene Kaspersky described the OS as a ground-up build to help protect industrial control systems.

A more detailed paper published at the time revealed it would be designed to help protect infrastructure like power stations, electricity grids, and telecommunications networks.

The paper described the need to protect industrial control systems with a ground-up built operating system and outlined the following design criteria:

The operating system cannot be based on existing computer code; therefore, it must be written from scratch.

To achieve a guarantee of security it must contain no mistakes or vulnerabilities whatsoever in the kernel, which controls the rest of the modules of the system. As a result, the core must be 100 percent verified as not permitting vulnerabilities or dual-purpose code.

For the same reason, the kernel needs to contain a very bare minimum of code, and that means that the maximum possible quantity of code, including drivers, needs to be controlled by the core and be executed with low-level access rights.

In such an environment there needs to be a powerful and reliable system of protection that supports different models of security.

Cobbled-together translations (Russian speakers may enjoy more detailed reading on Vedomosti.ru) paint a picture of a hardened operating system that allows users to control the level of process execution in industrial control systems, hospital equipment, and internet-of-things things.

It appears the operating system has been deployed in routers manufactured by Russian outfit Kraftway, a company that seems to sell into various industrial control system markets, and verticals including government, healthcare, and education.

It has been compared to Cisco's IOS and Huawei's VRP operating systems.

Russian coverage of KasperskyOS indicates a batch of 1000 of the new Kraftway routers has been produced costing up to US$3082 (£2342, A$4035) a unit. ®